Then You're His Minuend
by mayhit
Summary: This is not something normal girls do.


Title: Then You're His Minuend

Author: Amyhit

Spoilers: None? Or maybe up to All Things, just to be safe.

Rating: R

Disclaimer: I only wish

Summary: This is not something normal girls do.

Author's Notes: This is a back-story piece that maybe bit off a little more than it could chew. I'm not too sure how I feel about it yet. It takes place in the late half of the seventh season, though I wrote it after only having seen part of the fifth season. Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking either. Charlie Blueport is mine, as are his posse. All non-fleeting characters are not mine. I did a little research so the medical jargon should at least suffice for correctness, bit if any MDs read this and go 'huh?' then my apologies. Oh, and please feed me back, whatever the verdict. Thanks.

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It's afternoon and you've been up for 38 hours. The air smells of fresh tarmac as Mulder pushes, finally, inside of you. There's a bird outside your window. At first you think Mulder is crying, or you are, but it's just that bird. A cement truck is making its way up your street in the quiet of the weekday and Mulder's forearm is shaking beside your damp skull. He closes his eyes and you watch him drop his lips onto you – somewhere, anywhere. His top eyelashes open against your bottom ones.

For a moment you think, breathe, and your apartment is burnt with this fear smell – tar and a little love.

You drove his car to your apartment, he sat in the passenger seat. It was a strangely possessive combination you thought, and you licked the corner of your mouth, a little thrilled. Mulder saw your tongue dart, pink. You caught him watching in the rear view mirror and something in his gaze sharpened and he looked away. You sped up. The road was a perspective drawing on the horizon, sketching far past the rubber you were burning, into a hot point of desire.

It's fifteen minutes later and Mulder is on top of you. He breathes a morpheme into your ear. His breath stays hot in your hair for a while after the word has left you. Everything is suddenly so hot and you know it won't be long before you have to climb on top of him to catch a breath. He'll love it, you think. That white neck of yours bared like a vase, just so you can get a little cold air into your lungs.

It's early afternoon and there is no work to be done just now. The day is weighted, instead, by this heat, which licks at the bends of your elbows – at the backs of Mulder's knees where you pushed your heels into him only a moment ago.

Mulder is watching you, rapt by your rapture. You take in the sweet moue of his lips. His expression, you understand feverishly, is the same as your own. This is what you have done to each other. It's mutual metempsychosis.

You feel it sometimes, unnervingly, when he's sitting behind his desk talking about Forteana and wanting to touch you. You've been buried together, both figuratively and literally. You've been strange bedfellows for so long that when Mulder's lust creeps febrile through your soft female tissues, you know it before he does, like the first notes of a song about to burst into a stadium.

The spike in your libido is difficult for you – nothing you know how to deal with – and you cross your legs every time.

Outside your apartment a boy pumps his bicycle fast, faster – tires humming in the heat. You forgot to close your bedroom window – pure insanity, there is no other explanation – and you think to warn him, "Mulder "

Maybe it's the pale shadow of a look you're giving him or it's your hand on his bicep, but he already knows what you need of him: His hand covers your mouth before the neighbors end up becoming acquainted with your bedroom vernacular. Your voice flares against his palm, a note like a child playing a grass reed, making it cry.

Mulder's sweat drips onto your neck. You touch his hand with your hand and kiss him saltily. You are momentarily reminded of Narcissus kneeling at that pond. It scares you, you admit, it does – how myopic you can be when your synapses have brought Mulder into you this way. When the muscles between your legs, which you never believed capable of their own loneliness, remember him, and you come awake straining… it scares you, this new touch.

"Oh," you breathe. Voice burns your mouth on the inside and Mulder's stubble rasps the hollow of your cheek on the outside. You close your eyes and wait to become a flower.

When you open them again Mulder is above you mouthing, "Scully, Scully, Scully." Brings you back, he brings you back.

There is nothing you can say.

-

-

It's May and you're watching The Twilight Zone. You're trying to study too, but that maddeningly eerie theme music has captured your attention again. The lights are out in your suite's living room and when someone calls your phone you answer it moodily on the first ring.

"DK!" It's Cheryl. She sounds out of breath.

"Are you studying? You're studying I bet. Anyway, get down to the Oncology ward! We're already in the parking lot and it smells like snow. If you miss the storm tonight, tomorrow's gonna melt the hell out of us and you'll be bitter as – "

"She'll be bitter as acid rain!" yells Charlie in the background.

"You hear that?" demands Cheryl and she hangs up. You re-read the section in your textbook on tracheotomies. Then you pull on some jeans and leave the TV glaring so there'll be a light on when you come back in the middle of the night.

It's 1988. You wear your loppy little Hotel California t-shirt for most of that year and live not nearly far enough from the hospital. For a time it's closer quarters than you remember surviving under the summer your mother sent you off to bible studies camp. Once you hear the guys in your suite's kitchen talking mercilessly about you after they think you're asleep. They're talking about the mulberry meanness of your lips, 'hot-damn' being the apparent consensus.

For the past longer than you care to tally, it's been you and you're four boy friends and their girlfriends who actually get lonely enough to put out. All eight or ten of you just kicking around the campus after midnight, some of you swigging out of a thermos full of kirsch or just taking a draft ever now and then to fend of the night chill. The seven of you who are soon to sit for your Medical Boards mercilessly quiz each other on memorized information and reference pages out of 'Gray's Anatomy' as though this one book alone might save the world.

There's about six months of weather as dry as your study material. After two the octet of you catch enough cabin fever to keep your legs moving down the dark fields and across the lots, some nights for hours. You and Charlie Blueport catch it the worst so it's no surprise when after about four months he starts walking closer to you than to anyone, including his girlfriend.

You're cold, it's November, he gives you his coat one night. You wear it a bit but it's heavy and strange so you give it back. He says you should keep it a while. You say you don't want it, it fits wrong, and your voice is mean in the cloud of your breath.

Stung, he rasps, "Jesus Dana," to which you reply:

"Because your acromia are farther apart than mine," as though he'd asked you a question.

Nobody talks about you and Charlie though, brushing shoulders on every step. They talk instead about how obvious it is that you and Charlie are the 'go-getters' if there's ever been such a creature. 'The Scalpel Hounds', they say. Some of the guys take to calling you 'The Dame with a Brain'. They call Charlie 'The Man with the Hands'.

-

So there's those six months of dry weather and then there's Charlie, high on amphetamines at his girlfriend's Christmas party. It's classic Med student behavior really, and it doesn't surprise anybody accept for the people who thought they knew Charlie.

A friend of Cheryl's – Dick – whom everyone calls 'Dicer' has a shirt. It reads, "I'm not a drug dealer, I'm a generous diagnostician!" You never found it funny but you guess someone did because he wore it with the repetition of scrubs for a while during the autumn. After what happens with Charlie you figure he probably throws it out because no one ever sees it again.

Med students may be serious but damn it, sometimes they need a little sugar to help their own medicine go down. At least that's the theory after 'the best hands on campus' end up slumped in the back of Cheryl's walk-in closet. Then after they end up strapped to a gurney with an IV drip keeping their heart rate from taking off like a fly-swatted hummingbird.

Anyway, it makes for a particularly wild December 23.

-

That night you come into the closet with your supercilious pout painted on thick. You'd seen Charlie wander into the closet with a cigarette wedged between his V'ed fingers and you'd thought it best you check on him, if only to assuage your mounting fear of house fires.

When he sees you standing backlit in the doorway Charlie stands. "Dana." When the closet door swings shut he takes one measured step into your lips. You've had a couple of German beer, and at eight percent a pop you're a little dizzy – a little less capable of reading the warning signs than you should be.

You feel Charlie's breath on your philtrum and the sepulchral smell of rum. Then the distal phalanges of his grip are rushing to find the sutures of your skull and he breaths onto you in the dark for the first time. "You have good phrenology, Dana," he says. His hands are gripping your hair, sticky with more sweat than is natural, you note. It hurts a little.

There's a response that his words produce in you, a soprano head rush. This becomes only more frightening when his adroit fingers find the sports bra three sizes too small that's binding you under your shirt. You've been avoiding the question of your own sexuality for years now actually, in favor of androgyny and boyish independence.

And because he's a doctor, and not a moron, he rubs at the taut elastic like a scar and suddenly it's pretty damn obvious that this is not something normal girls do. He stills and after a moment and he asks you in the dark, uselessly, "Why?"

You shrug his hands out from under your shirt. You didn't come in here for this. "Charlie, what are you doing in here? Do you know how easily fires can be started with a single misplaced cigarette butt? What did you take tonight?"

He takes his whole right hand and puts it against your forehead as though you're a child with a fever. "Dana, why?" he says, and god knows if he's talking about you in your methodical bind, or him and his wondrous hands, or the two of you and whatever it is he thinks there is between you. His odd behavior is because of the drug, you know, but his hand stays put on your forehead – the fingers for once unsteady – until one of you finally sobs first.

Suddenly the smell of Cheryl's prom dress is making you nauseous, or it's the alcohol combined with caffeine taken hours previous, or it's Charlie still saying, "Why Dana, why us?" As though you're supposed to have an answer for everything either of you does. As though you've ever been anything but a calculating goody two shoes, and you're going to be able to explain to him why he was stupid enough to take some first-year's Meth.

You stand there for a moment, not answering him, and the knowledge hits you suddenly that you're a better doctor than he is. It's a realization you've been avoiding all semester and it subsequently leads to the realization that you aren't even a little bit wet and that you're standing in a closet with Cheryl's boyfriend and not even planning to have sex with him. It's such a bad idea that you turn to leave.

At the door Charlie's hand comes down on your shoulder from behind, followed by Charlie's sternum falling against you in the dark. It's too heavy to be a come-on, you know instantly – even with Charlie more strung out than a lume. The two of you collapse out of the closet onto Cheryl's bedroom floor, overlaying each other like dominoes. There's a moment where you think your arm is broken. Then you hear a high moan and you look up to see Cheryl, dismayed, staring down at her boyfriend on top of you as his systolic pressure bottom's out.

-

It's the first time you've ever felt someone's pulse pull up stakes on them before and you feel it through your back where Charlie's pressing you into the floor.

-

Later you wake up in a hospital waiting-room chair in the presence of Johnny and Richard. Most of your lipstick is rubbed off somewhere on Charlie. All you can think at first – sick as it is – is that at least you were the one to administer CPR. Now nobody's going to know your lipstick was on Charlie way before that.

You remember having to do it all on your own, head spinning with hops, because Cheryl was too busy screaming about what a bitch you were to do it herself. _Airway, Breathing, Circulation. Easy Dana, a first-grader could do this, come on now._ But Cheryl's face looked hot with tears in the lamplight and you were barely breathing enough for one body, not two. There's some resin on your cheek from where the guys tried to tape the broken phone back together a few weeks ago. The guys say you held the receiver between your ear and your shoulder while you counted Charlie's heart palpitations.

You wake up in the hospital waiting room and your head aches. Some time last night The Beatles sang 'Eleanor Rigby'. You remember the violins playing as one, and then two of Charlie's floating ribs broke under your hands.

You wake up to the sound of someone named Dr. Mandrake being paged (ironically) to investigate a toxicology report. As soon as you're sitting up Richard's got his arm around you though, and Johnny's putting a ginger ale in your hands. Both of them call you a hero a few times, loudly and before you can shut them up. Apparently you administer pretty good drunken CPR. They even thought to put a straw in the ginger ale for you.

Last night you told the paramedics every last relevant detail with your neck craned through the crowd of drunken co-eds towards Charlie's gurney. Words like 'vasoconstriction' and 'bronchodilation' you could deal with. You told them the thing that only you knew; that Charlie was on SSRI's and painkillers, which probably explained the broken ribs: bone density loss was a common side effect. You rode in the ambulance because you didn't give a fuck about finding Cheryl, and you picked yourself up off the floor in the back without realizing you were bleeding from the lip. In fact, you only lost your composure when the MDs wouldn't let you into the ICU with the gurney. You remember running with your hand around the wheeling metal frame and then the nurse was pulling you away to ask you what your relation to The Admitted was.

You yanked her hand from your wrist the way you'd once seen Richard do to a man who had wanted to fight him. "What the hell does that matter?" you spat, very low, and then you did taste the blood in your mouth.

You drink your ginger ale. You wait until you're back in your suite with a bathroom door that locks before you throw up bile and soda into the toilet. Cheryl comes over when it gets dark. She brings you the coat you wore to the party and the two of you sit around listening to Springsteen sing about America. She thanks you for what you did last night. Just before she leaves she apologizes for what she thought you did.

Springsteen sings, 'some bloodshot forget-me-not whispers daddy's within ear shot'.

When you got home you're head had been spinning for so long that you went straight for the bathroom and your upheavals were so violent you were glad you hadn't taken your shoes off. You would have scrapped your toes digging them against the floor. Cheryl knocks on your door while you're drying your face. She stays for a half hour or so and you decide to keep your shoes on until she leaves. Somehow bare feet have always unnerved you – so unprofessional, you guess. After the front door shuts behind her you go into your room and press your hands against your ribs to warm them until you fall asleep.

Later when you wake you've crawled under the covers. Someone's cooking bacon out in the kitchen – you can hear it as much as smell it. You think about how in Greek the fragment '-tom' means 'to cut' and '-stom' means 'mouth', which is why a tracheotomy and a tracheostomy are different things. It might be Thursday, or Friday, and maybe night – it feels like night.

Between the clean sheets your muddy sneakers are still on and you wonder if you even know yourself at all.

-

You don't visit Charlie for a week. Then you show up one afternoon when you're supposed to be in class and you tell him you're sorry you couldn't make it sooner but you had class. He looks like a child. You tell him he looks like he went ten rounds with necrosis, which leads Charlie to ask hopefully, remorsefully, "Ever wanted to try necrophilia, Dana?" You see that he cracks his lips grinning at you.

It's too much, really – always has been – and not enough either, because when you met him he asked you if you knew the mnemonic 'Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can't Handle' and you never did respect him.

You change the subject on him the requisite three times of someone who is 'honest to god trying to make comfortable conversation'. You wind up paraphrasing something about his 'febrile condition at the time of admittance having caused possible long-term damage to his bronchi, and about other things that have been 'exacerbated by the trace amines'.

Charlie just nods like it doesn't mean a thing. The TV is on in the corner of the room. He watches Sean Connery seducing Pussy Galore on the small screen.

Meanwhile, you recite him his medical stats in a voice so unbiased he can't even look at you.

-

Charlie drops out of the medical program two months before graduation. He sleeps on Cheryl's couch and waits for her to graduate. Cheryl won't let him sleep in her bed at first. She says it's because he scared her by almost dying. She doesn't talk to you anymore though, and you know what really scared Cheryl the night Charlie almost died. She colors her hair red like yours and the two of you don't speak.

She is crying one day, sitting across from Charlie in the food court at the hospital. Charlie gives her his arms to cry into. When she's done he takes out the scalpel he always keeps in his pocket and you watch as he cuts up her apple for her. Charlie's never used his scalpel for anything that didn't used to be inside a person. That's the first day you know he's quit the program.

You bare down on studying and the Boards are easier than you'd thought they would be. Summa Cum Laude is the name of the game – always has been for you, and you don't give yourself an inch. You wander through a few long nights of spring-scented fog, reading 'Gray's' now that the boards are over and realizing you actually like the bodies intrinsic algorithms. It only takes you an additional six hours of throwing out everything you own before your suite is empty. Charlie comes to your door at sunset. The door is already open but he knocks anyway. You look over your shoulder and see him standing under the lintel with bleeding knuckles and a box of pizza. He looks past you at the counter where you've just unplugged 'the oldest toaster known to mankind'.

"Isn't that 'the oldest toaster known to mankind'?" Charlie asks and you tell him it's the very one. You tell him because he's been in as much of a mood for throwing out things with emotional value as you have, lately. For the longest time after he found it abandoned outside someone else's suite he would joke that it had followed him back to yours. Really it was just a coincidental gift. You were broke and too proud to ask your Father for a loan while you and he were still fighting, so when Charlie happened to find some old thing left around he remembered you liked toasted bagels for breakfast and salvaged it for you.

"I still think they're something wrong with that sprockety old thing," he says. "People don't just leave forty year old toasters in dorm hallways for no reason."

"Two years of bagels disprove that theory, Charlie," you banter. Before he can stop you, you're carrying the toaster into the hall and coming back empty handed. Someone else can start their suite on fire with faulty circuitry.

Charlie says it's like the circle of life. He's leaning on his toes, looking towards the toaster out in the hall as though it might be lonely out there. "Things crawl in, things crawl out," he murmurs. You rifle around in the fridge until you've got a handful of ice cubes.

"More like the ouroboros," you figure, because you don't think that toaster has got a shiny new Black and Decker incarnation coming around any time soon. You're not really that optimistic. You press a t-shirt full of ice against Charlie's banged up hand for a while and the two of you don't say much.

He breaks the silence eventually and tells you how good it felt to hit something – to just fucking _hit something – _without worrying about damaging his 'surgery tools'. His voice sounds as full as a fist in the empty living room. Yours is the opposite, thin because he's an idiot and it's killing you not saying so.

When he looks at you in the murky dusk it's a full moment before you realize he actually thinks you'll understand.

"I really have no parlance to discuss this with you Charlie," is what you finally settle on telling him. His face falls and you think you're never going to see that disappointment again. He's leaving, you know that now. He's had that white-knight countenance for a week already – as though he's about to go riding into a sunset, and as though you've ever had the kind of feet that can be swept along.

"You idiot," you tell him after all.

You look down at your high heels and then up past his shoulder, out the window. Your feet are hot in their patent leather carapaces. The sky is cooling. You dare yourself to touch his shoulder. Then you blame everything you're feeling on 'post-culminational lethargy' and you keep your hands to yourself.

Maybe another man will come along at a future date and he'll be different but still somehow brilliant. Maybe there will be close calls and cases of 'the hospital vending machine blues' in your future. Maybe he'll make you follow him into his sunset, or else he'll fashion a sunset that belongs to no one at all – a too-wild sunset that swallows you up together. At this point you're kind of hoping there is no brilliant man – no tail and fangs come 'round again.

After a while the t-shirt begins to drip and Charlie pulls it out of your grasp. You watch as though dumb as the ice scatters. With that out of the way he steps a little closer and says, "Congratulations Dana, I heard you passed your boards with honors." At last his voice is as unbiased by emotion as yours has always been. "The Dame With a Brain," he says and it's as though he's realized that you might not love anything, least of all him.

Then he uses his bleeding hands to straighten your fingers, the right ones before the left, until they are splayed palms up between you. Your knuckles are stiff with cold from the ice.

Cheryl honks suddenly from outside. Standing where you are you can see her idling on the street below but Charlie can't. He doesn't move to look. Cheryl's driving Charlie's car and the back is full of her and Charlie's stuff. Charlie runs his hands up your hands until your palms fit backwards against each other's and he still doesn't move to look out the window. Even now, with his girlfriend in his Honda wearing a mini-dress and a summer tan, the only thing keeping Charlie's hands off of you is you.

The neighborhood is warm with the smell of beer kegs and all-you-can-eat hot dogs down by the Pediatrics ward. Charlie says, "You've got the world under your scalpel now, Dana. Just like you always wanted." He hums lightly in his throat and it has nothing to do with him anymore, that sometimes you feel like you're never going to be happy.

Cheryl honks again and Charlie just stands there for a while, looking down at your hands with you. It's as though for the first time you aren't sure there is a single life they can save.

-

-

Mulder pushes inside of you again, again, again in your apartment in the strange orange light. The sheets on your bed are crisp from another night's sweat and you press you face desperately into the place where your own body lay. That was a week ago, the night before you both flew off to Austin. Life with Mulder is plane tickets and crawling into an unmade bed at 3 AM, alone. It's your dog being eaten by a crocodile and you forgetting to throw out the dog bowl for months.

There's an imprint of you in the bed, Mulder notices, and it's very erotic. A poltergeist in the sheets.

You've done this before, of course – you and Mulder. Hell, you think you even have a toothbrush tucked away somewhere at Mulder's place if you could remember where you put it. Even so, this still hurts a little, at first. It's almost like the numb hot pull of having a lot of blood drawn very fast. Even in this heat with your bodies amphibious with sweat it hurts.

"Mulder," you inhale as he pushes into you and you keep your eyes on his face for the first few thrusts. Some threads of your hair have plastered themselves to his jaw. The first time you were with Mulder you were caught off guard by how rapidly the experience changed – how drastic he made you feel. By the time you've raised your fingers to brush your hair aside, your hand is shaking, and should you speak, it would come out in utterances. You're already so close to coming. You suppose you're still caught off guard, every time.

You think this is lunacy – something Ovid once said about lovers being mad. You think you're incoherence is unforgivable, but oh – dear god – this is Mulder who's inside of you, his saliva tasting like grapes and copper. His thumb is in your mouth, rubbing against your tricuspids. Your paramour, your salty monomaniac – this is Mulder.

"Fuck," you say, "Mulder," you say, and he answers you:

"Scully, Scully, Scully."

You remember the voice you had in University, raspier because you were a smoker for a while. The fullness of your lips, you made sure, was overshadowed by the vastness of your medical jargon.

After Mulder brings you back from the wasteland of orgasm and before he makes sure you come for the second time, it's what you remember; your pedantic life. DK, the little soldier with a musette full of fuck-you attitude and hair down past your female shoulders for the last time. You were going to buy yourself a nice suit when you graduated. You told yourself, "Once I've felt someone's heart beat to life under my hands, then it'll stop feeling like I'm on the wrong path. Then it'll all feel – synchronistic."

A few nights ago you entered your apartment in the dark and you wondered, plainly, when it was you had stopped turning your back on a room in order to close the door behind you. You work holidays now. When it snows you can feel the frost-weight on the ground above you. You bought that sheriff – Jack, from Maine – a poster like the one Mulder has. You sealed the envelope and put the postage on it but it's still in your dresser in the bottom drawer. You've stopped asking yourself why.

Some mornings before you've had your coffee, before you've answered the ringing phone and talked to Mulder, you think you're not going to survive all of this. At night when it's cloudless you sleep on top of your blankets in the starlight and you know you're fighting for the world and for a moment you just think, breathe. Sometimes when Mulder touches you and then he pulls away it feels strange, being Mulder's feisty redhead – and then you're his minuend.

You're the incarnation of his work, you're Galatea, faultless ivory white in the arms of the sulking genius. Then you're simply his reflection – something he'd take from you, were he to leave. You were always so eloquent before you met Mulder. Before you began believing in aliens and love.

Fin.


End file.
